Looks like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (GYM) are combining forces on the Sitemaps standard. They’ve created a website sitemaps.org.

Here are links to Yahoo! and Google announcing the change. It looks like when one engine, or maybe Google mostly, hits on a good idea, other engines aren’t shy to pick up on it. The same thing happened with the NOFOLLOW attribute on links.

Sitemaps allows you to describe your site better to search engines, as well as gives you some insight into the crawling performance of your website.

Some things I wonder about with this announcement:

• With RE: Yahoo’s paid inclusion strategy: I suppose Paid Inclusion will have preference over Sitemaps submitted data?
• When will Ask.com follow?

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